Assignment Overview

Just as I was preparing to compose this assignment, my friend @ryancordell, Assistant Professor of English at Northeastern University, tweeted the following:

I’ll start our grad student session shortly: what tweetable advice would you give junior scholars about having an online scholarly presence?
— Ryan Cordell (@ryancordell) September 25, 2012

Ryan, who has 1900+ followers, received 70+ replies to this tweet, illustrating one of the beauties of social media, overall, and Twitter, in particular: collaboration and the sharing of ideas builds robust learning and knowledge communities. Social media facilitates this community building in ways no other media come close to being able to do. When I asked Ryan how many replies he got, Ryan replied:

@billwolff enough people were accessing the post yesterday that it crashed *my* online presence-I’m thinking abt upgrading my hosting!

— Ryan Cordell (@ryancordell) September 26, 2012

Ryan collated the replies using Storify, which is a platform that allows people to curate social media posts into a single narrative. It is too long to embed, but here is a screen shot of the beginning:

Rather than me describing in limited terms the benefits and issues relating to developing an Online Scholarly Presence, the first part of the assignment is for you to read Ryan’s Storify, Building an Online Scholarly Presence. As you read, go to the Twitter pages of the people who have offered advice. Learn who they are and think about why they are offering the advice they are offering. Notice that the most consistent thing in the replies is this: as graduate students you must begin to create an online presence for yourself. This is vital regardless of your chosen field.

Assignment Specifics

The goal of this assignment is to create an integrated social media presence. That means having multiple online and in-print media spaces that have consistent bios, descriptions, taglines, and profile pictures. It means ensuring that they link to one another, and a site or space has only 1 option for a link, that it goes to your web site. It means having a way for people to contact you, either via a form field, an email address, or @twitter. It means making your spaces public and publishing your ideas and work for people to see. And it means keeping up with each space so that they remain current.

To complete the assignment, each student will create and link to at least the following:

• a blog using WordPress.com (URL should be: yourwebsitename.wordpress.com, so, for example, meggmccourt.wordpress.com); see the blogging assignment
• a microblog using Twitter; see the Twitter assignment
• a social bookmarking space using Diigo; see the social bookmarking assignment (to be added)
• a social photo sharing space using Flickr
• a LinkedIn profile
• any other social media space that you think your field requires

Before there was the web, people used print documents to engage with each other socially. They still do. As a result, students will also create the following print media that contains your name, future writing profession (e.g. freelance writer, travel writer, poet, etc.), email address, Twitter @username, web site address, and phone number:

• a business card
• letterhead (this should include your mailing address)

Your print media should have the same emotional design qualities as your web site, which we will discuss in Project 2. I suggest using VistaPrint, though there are many services that will allow you to custom design business cards and letterhead.

Due Dates

For blogging, Twitter, and Diigo due dates and specifics, see their respective assignments

Flickr, LinkedIn, and other social media spaces created and linked: 11/1 and 11/15 as part of the Professional Site Rough and Final Drafts

Business card and letterhead designs completed: 11/1 and 11/15 as part of the Professional Site Rough and Final Drafts